Laura Crandon, founder and president of Touch4Life, a breast-health equity nonprofit, shares her thoughts on The New York Times Opinion guest essay “Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?” and discusses the importance of biomarker testing for Black women.
While Kate Pickert points out many disparities in care and outcomes, she doesn’t mention a big factor tied to many revolutionary treatments—biomarkers.
Black women like me, for example, are more than 50 percent less likely to receive genetic and genomic tests to identify biomarkers for breast cancer that make us eligible for precision oncology clinical trials and lifesaving targeted drugs, such as antibody drug conjugates, which target specific tumor cells.
Precision oncology requires knowing the mutations driving a person’s breast cancer. Biomarkers are the key to unlocking cancer risks and treatment.
However, many nonwhite women, like me, aren’t being tested, so when a clinical trial is looking for women with a specific genetic mutation, we won’t know we are eligible because we don’t know that we have that mutation. When the latest lifesaving drug comes on the market, we won’t know if the drug is right for us because our biomarkers aren’t known.
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